By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.

But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.

You might be tempted to shrug this off, since these budgets will not, in fact, become law. Or you might say that this is what all politicians do. But it isn’t. The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.

So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security. What form would these further cuts take? We get no hint.

Meanwhile, both budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.

And there’s more: The budgets also claim large reductions in spending on other programs. How would these be achieved? You know the answer.

It’s very important to realize that this isn’t normal political behavior. The George W. Bush administration was no slouch when it came to deceptive presentation of tax plans, but it was never this blatant. And the Obama administration has been remarkably scrupulous in its fiscal pronouncements.

O.K., I can already hear the snickering, but it’s the simple truth. Remember all the ridicule heaped on the spending projections in the Affordable Care Act? Actual spending is coming in well below expectations, and the Congressional Budget Office has marked its forecast for the next decade down by 20 percent. Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.

So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for decades.

But I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt — which means that they must include trillions in imaginary, unexplained savings.

Does this mean that all those politicians declaiming about the evils of budget deficits and their determination to end the scourge of debt were never sincere? Yes, it does.

Look, I know that it’s hard to keep up the outrage after so many years of fiscal fraudulence. But please try. We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

[Another commentary on Tom Cotton’s perfidy: The senator responsible for leading 47 percent of the Senate to destroy President Obama’s negotiations with Iran to get keep the country from building nuclear weapons is now concerned about the U.S. State Department’s cautious approach toward Netanyahu’s opposition to a two-state solution with Palestine. After the spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters that “we’re currently evaluating our approach,” Cotton came out swinging:

“While Prime Minister Netanyahu won a decisive victory, he still has just started assembling a governing majority coalition. These kinds of quotes from Israel’s most important ally could very well startle some of the smaller parties and their leaders with whom Prime Minister Netanyahu is currently in negotiations. This raises the question, of course, if the administration intends to undermine Prime Minister Netanyahu’s efforts to assemble a coalition by suggesting a change to our longstanding policy of supporting Israel’s position with the United Nations.”

Cotton, the man who undermined his own president through his letter to Iran and his support of Netanyahu’s coming to lobby for war on Iran is worried about undermining? The senator long ago declared that his letter ‘s purpose was to target international diplomacy, undermine American foreign policy, and disrupt officials during their ongoing negotiations.

In return, Cotton worries that the term “evaluating our approach” will “startle” officials abroad who are “currently in negotiations.” On the Senate floor, Cotton added, “I fear mutual respect is of little concern to this administration. The president and all those senior officials around him should carefully consider the diplomatic and security consequences of their words.” We can only assume that Cotton is trying to match the high level of hypocrisy that Netanyahu has established this past week.]

April 3, 2014

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the man who thinks that the country’s problems would be solved if only men in the inner city would get to work, has released his fourth annual budget proposal, again full of welfare subsidies for the wealthy. Today the man with a position that even the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have condemned as immoral received an award for public service from the Catholic Marquette University. People are paying up to $25,000 for tickets and sponsorships for its fancy luncheon.

Budgets reflect a political party’s priorities and values. Ryan (public service award winner) has created that cuts $5.1 trillion over ten years by increasing defense spending, giving money to the wealthy, and taking money from the rest of the people in the country:

Reduction of the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and drop the highest income tax bracketed (90 percent in the 1950s) from 39.6 percent to 25 percent with any necessary taxes taken from middle-class taxpayers.

Protection of $45 billion in tax subsidies over 10 years to oil companies, the top five of which already reaped $93 billion in profits from 2013 alone.

Repeal of the Medicaid expansion provision in the Affordable Care Act by eliminating $1.5 trillion over ten years from the program that covered 67 million people in 2012, including 32 million children.

Cuts of $125 billion over ten years from the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), also called food stamps.

Erasure of the ACA. Medicare staying the same for those receiving it at this time but future Medicare plans coming from an exchange of private insurers—just like ACA. Policing of these private sector plays “to avoid cherry-picking and ensure that Medicare’s sickest and highest-cost beneficiaries receive coverage.” Just like the ACA. Medicare forcing 55-year-olds into a new voucher system that would increase Medicare premiums by 50 percent, according to the CBO.

Massive cuts to infrastructure, science, medical research, college loans, education etc. past the current disastrous level caused by sequestration despite the fact that austerity has been proved to fail as shown by the damaged economy from the George W. Bush austerity. In Europe, the deeper the austerity, the higher the unemployment; Ryan’s budget could lose 1.1 million jobs in one year. Difference between unemployment with and without the GOP austerity.

Huge unspecified cuts in low-income programs such as school lunches, child nutrition programs, and Supplemental Security Income which helps severely poor disabled and elderly people as well as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which Ryan praised in his recent poverty report while saving farm programs.